The Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his equally despotic wife are under lock and key in a New York prison, living embodiments of President Trump’s revivification of the Monroe Doctrine. Maduro, the chosen successor of the demagogic leftist tyrant Hugo Chávez, presided over a gangster regime that had reduced its people to hunger and penury, driving a third of Venezuela’s 24 million citizens into exile. Maduro’s regime maintained power through stolen elections, the machinations of the Cuban secret police, and active collaboration with the most unsavory drug cartels.

For a time, Chávez’s so-called Bolivarian socialism bought off the poor with bread and circuses—that is, massive subsidies and assorted free goodies made possible by high oil prices. This was bolstered by the ideological illusions of leftist political elites and Hollywood stars, ranging from Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and Bernie Sanders to Danny Glover and Sean Penn, who saw another exotic socialist paradise and an avatar of social justice in the making. But over time the Chavista regime revealed itself as yet another nightmare scenario, where political liberty was confiscated, arbitrary power went unchallenged, and food was remarkably scarce. The war on the rich and the entrepreneurial middle classes always turns out to be a war on everyone, including the urban and rural poor.

Beginning with Rómulo Betancourt’s presidency in 1958, Venezuela had been a thriving and relatively prosperous democracy, blessed with abundant oil supplies. It had steadfastly resisted the Castroite temptation of equality in penury and tyranny. For 40 years, it featured an oscillation of power between the Social Democrats (the Democratic Action Party) and the Christian Democrats (the so-called COPEI party). Venezuela was a free society with a thriving civil society, even if the regime had something of a plutocratic cast, and large pockets of urban poverty persisted. Venezuela’s imperfect democratic system needed reform, but assuredly not radical revolution based on the discredited Cuban model.

Hugo Chávez, a radicalized military officer and aspiring tyrant, attempted his first coup in 1992 but was quickly arrested. In 1994, however, the Christian Democratic president of the country, Rafael Caldera, made the fatal mistake of pardoning him. Chávez benefited from the naïveté of the established elites and an undeniable charisma reinforced by demagogic rhetoric of the most incendiary sort. Maduro remained faithful to Chávez’s legacy after the tyrant died in 2013. But he lacked his predecessor’s charisma and the benefit of unduly high oil prices that had given a regime with self-destructive economic policies room to maneuver.

Maduro had moved ever closer politically and economically to the Russians and the Chinese, ignoring Trump’s warnings about the central role it played in the illegal drug trade. His regime supported revolutionary parties and movements throughout the Americas and attacked the United States in the shrillest ideological manner. Most of Venezuela’s millions of refugees were victims of political repression and a disastrously failed economy, but some were products of the country’s lost and under-socialized lumpen proletariat, destabilizing not only the country but also the continent.

Maduro and his minions underestimated the extent to which Trump took the Monroe Doctrine seriously, rather than playing lip service to it as his immediate predecessors had done. He would no longer allow determined enemies of the United States to challenge our vital interests and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Trump had also grown fond of surgical and carefully planned military strikes. He did not hesitate to assemble a naval armada in the Caribbean to make clear to the Venezuelans that he was perfectly willing and able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

So on January 3, 2026, the United States launched an impressive military strike. Maduro and his wife were captured, and dozens of Cuban guards were killed—but no American lives were lost. The Trump Administration immediately eschewed any effort at regime change, at least in the short term. The Chavista elite remains in power, but very much under the thumb of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and American officials in charge of our Venezuelan policy. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, a militant Chavista herself, has reluctantly accommodated herself to the new facts on the ground and effectively cut off her country’s ties to Russia and China. President Trump announced that the United States would henceforth control the flow of Venezuelan oil for the benefit of a hitherto deprived people and the United States itself.

Yet ideological thugs such as Venezuelan Ministry of the Interior Diosdado Cabello Rondón have continued to viciously denounce opposition forces, speaking the shrill, ideologically charged language of the Chavista movement. He has even called the Venezuelan Catholic bishops, who have spoken up clearly and courageously against the revolutionary dictatorship and called for the restoration of human rights and self-government, “fascists in black cassocks.” In partial compliance, numerous political prisoners have been released. But even here, the rump of the Chavista regime has sent very mixed messages. An admirable Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Pablo Guanipa, was released from prison on February 8, only to be rearrested for supposedly encouraging terrorism. Diosdado Cabello is clearly behind this latest move, which makes a mockery of the regime’s promise to carry out a general amnesty by February 13.

One can understand why the Trump Administration decided not to pursue an immediate strategy of regime change in Venezuela. After over 25 years of Chavista despotism, the opposition, however legitimate in the eyes of the Venezuelan people, was not prepared to come to power. Some kind of transition was undoubtedly necessary. But there is more to it than that.

As Elliott Abrams, Trump’s point man on things Venezuelan during the president’s first term in office, writes in the February 2026 issue of Commentary, Trump came to see the Venezuelan opposition as weak, a fatal flaw in his view of the world. The president became disillusioned with the opposition after the United States threw its support behind the legitimate winner of Venezuela’s 2018 presidential election, Juan Guaidó (whom he introduced during his 2020 State of the Union address). But, as Abrams puts it, the regime still failed to “crumble.”

Trump’s judgment on this point is summary and arguably unfair. But even its overwhelming victory in the 2023 Venezuelan presidential elections did not soften Trump’s low opinion of the country’s political opposition. Abrams notes that Trump has even “openly deprecate(d) the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado,” a woman of courage and integrity who surely deserved better treatment from the president of the United States (although Trump has more recently met and praised her).

The Limits of Realpolitik

But I am confident that the administration’s present approach to regime change in Venezuela will not persist, because it cannot persist. Let me explain by citing an inexact but instructive historical parallel that reveals that realpolitik is never enough, at least in the long run.

From November 8 to November 16, 1942, Allied forces carried out a land invasion of North Africa that brought American forces into battle in the European theater for the first time. They met fierce resistance from military forces allied with Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime, but also received sympathy and support from that part of French opinion in North Africa aligned with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement and its armed auxiliary, “Fighting France.”

A misplaced sense of realpolitik, however, reinforced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s irrational disdain for de Gaulle (whom he falsely saw as an aspiring tyrant), led the Roosevelt Administration to turn over the administration of liberated North Africa to a Vichyite admiral, François Darlan. This move was met with anger and incomprehension from everyone from Winston Churchill (at least privately) to the Free French movement, the French Resistance, the French colons of North Africa, and the mass of opinion throughout the democratic world. This display of false realism was nipped in the bud, so to speak, when a disillusioned individual acting alone, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, assassinated Darlan on Christmas Day 1942. The United States was thus saved, to some extent at least, from its own folly.

In his magisterial War Memoirs, Charles de Gaulle sums up the moral lesson to be learned from this unfortunate episode. As the great French general and statesman suggests, pure realpolitik is at once unrealistic and too clever by half, precisely because it is insensitive to the moral dimensions of political and historical reality. Speaking to British ministers in London in the middle of these events, de Gaulle got to the heart of the matter:

You invoke strategic reasons, but it is a strategic error to place oneself in a situation contradictory to the moral character of this war. We are no longer in the eighteenth century when Frederick the Great paid the courtiers of Vienna in order to be able to take Silesia, nor in the Italian Renaissance when one hired the myrmidons of Milan or the mercenaries of Florence. At least, we do not put them at the head of a liberated people afterward. Today we make war with our own blood and the suffering of nations.

I believe that the most thoughtful actors in the Trump Administration appreciate these truths and that its tolerance of the thuggish remnants of the Chavista despotism in Venezuela will turn out to be a temporary expedient excused or dictated by prudence.

My follow-up piece will address the prospects opened for regime change in Cuba that have been made possible by Maduro’s overthrow. Cubans are suffering as never before, and our principles and interests make action on that front more feasible than ever. President Trump has cut off oil supplies to Cuba while channeling aid to the oppressed Cuban people via the Catholic Church—a good and effective start.